Chapter Two
The headache Mark woke with wasn’t terribly impressive, but he wondered if it was a good enough excuse to cut class. Bad news, if this was only the second class meeting and he already wanted to cut.
Rush week had been exhausting. How Brandon had managed to rush half the fraternities on campus was beyond Mark. Just rushing one had been enough of a trial. Hours of parties, interviews with the Alpha Delt pledge trainer—whose name was Rob Stowe, but everyone called him Bengal—and through it all Mark was trying to read the first three chapters in his bio textbook, because he was supposed to have them read by the first class, but the shit was so boring.
And all week Brandon had insisted they couldn’t drink too much. Parties every night. With beer. And Brandon said no, that getting drunk during rush week did not make a good impression, that no matter how wild the parties got, rushees were expected to remain in control.
So Mark had gotten shit-faced at the first available opportunity. He’d done it the next night as well at the graffiti party and had written Alpha Delta can kiss my arse on the paper-covered wall. Which was pretty dumb, in sober hindsight. Because even the Alpha Delts would be smart enough to spot the smoking gun of his spelling.
Brandon hadn’t been there for that, and Mark was glad. He didn’t want to admit it, but he sort of hated the idea of disappointing Brandon. He’d met few people in his life who were so…sincere. Brandon had been over at a charades night at Delta Delta Pi or Kappa Kappa Gamma or whatever the fuck. Who could keep them all straight?
Anyway, Mark had ended the week fairly sure he wouldn’t be getting a bid, but surprise—the night before classes started, Jackson had turned up at his dorm to formally extend the bid. That had been an awkward-as-fuck conversation. Neither Mark nor Jackson had any inclination to pretend to be happy about the situation. It was only when Brandon called to announce he’d gotten a bid from Alpha—and from about eight other frats, but he was gonna accept Alpha’s bid—that Mark was able to muster any semblance of enthusiasm.
At least he’d have a pledge buddy.
He hauled himself out of bed, threw on jeans and a T-shirt—fuck a polo—combed his hair, and headed for campus. His dorm was on North Side, and American lit was on South Side. He didn’t have the route down yet. A look at his phone showed Blake had texted him about walking to class together. At one point last week, they’d exchanged numbers because they’d been drunk and had discovered they had American lit together, but Mark was at a loss to remember which night that had been, or which party. The text didn’t have much going for it in terms of correct spelling, but Mark got the gist.
It had been sent forty-five minutes ago, so Blake was likely already on South Side. Blake didn’t seem to understand what was going on in class any more than Mark did, but he claimed he always showed up to classes on time—otherwise he got reported to the athletic center. Mark, on the other hand, was going to be at least five minutes late.
Mark crossed the street he thought he was supposed to cross. It was a gray day, he was in a lousy mood, and tonight he had to go to Alpha Delt for some pledge introductory activity. He most definitely hadn’t read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” for class today. Seriously, how had he gotten stuck in the one class that made you do shit the first week?
Oh, right. His adviser had told him to get his English credits out of the way. And this lit class with this let’s-jump-right-into-it professor had been the only one still open. And his adviser had seemed to think it would be a brilliant cultural experience for him to take American lit. Um, yeah. It was a class mostly for sophomores and juniors, but something or other Mark had taken in summer school had made him eligible to sign up. Great. He was the worst student in class short of Blake, and people would think he was some kind of show-off freshman whiz kid.
The problem with a title like Young Goodman Brown was that it didn’t give him a hint as to what it was about. Apart from the Brown guy. And all Mark got when he thought about Nathaniel Hawthorne was the image of a man in a tricorn hat. Who was probably Ben Franklin anyway. Shit, he didn’t even have time to Google it.
He slid into a back-row desk at seven minutes past the hour. Blake was sitting a couple of rows away, his earbuds in, staring blankly at the front of the room, where Professor Heyman had some notes up for “Young Goodman Brown.” Mark took out his notebook and pretended to write. Instead, he doodled.
You didn’t know what you had until it was gone, right? Mark estimated 88 percent of the days he’d been in Pennsylvania had been overcast. All right, the summer hadn’t been that bad, and Jim swore in the fall when the leaves turned, New England was gorgeous. But Bundaberg was sunny nearly all the time. Plus, beaches.
And he’d been close with his mates, but he’d kind of taken them for granted, because they’d been hanging out since they were kids, and Mark had figured they’d always hang out.
Here he had Blake, who was currently nodding in time to his music, which was loud enough that Mark could hear it, tinny and muffled, when Professor Heyman stopped talking. And he had Brandon, who was probably in his dorm right now practicing his shoe-polishing skills so he could give the Alpha Delts free shine-ups tonight. And he had Jackson. Or maybe he didn’t have Jackson. Jackson certainly didn’t want anything to do with him. He didn’t think Jackson hated him, necessarily. They just didn’t have a damn thing in common.
Baz and Richo would have laughed their arses off if they could have seen Mark in his rush interviews. Interviews, Jesus—like you were applying for a job or something. All Mark could compare it to was that time he and Baz had built a tree house and made Richo apply for membership of their Super Secret Club. They’d been eight. And the Super Secret Club had lasted right up until the first stiff breeze had knocked the tree house, and Baz, out of the tree. Still, the girls liked his rakish scar.
But Mark had sat through the interview with Bengal—Bengal? Tool—and almost managed to keep his sarcasm under control, since Jackson was there too, and the last thing Mark wanted was for Jim to find out how not-seriously he was taking all this.
“So tell me, Mark, why do you want to join a fraternity?”
“We don’t actually have frats at home, and—”
Bengal had held up a hand. “Dude, you never shorten it. Don’t call a fraternity a frat. You wouldn’t call your country a cunt, would you?”
And he’d smirked proudly, as though he thought Oscar Wilde might have been applauding from beyond the grave at that display of razor-sharp wit.
“No,” Mark had answered. “Not my country.”
Jackson got it. Mark had felt the full force of his glower, but Bengal, still high on the buzz of his own joke, had missed it.
Mark sighed and glanced up again. Shit. Those were a lot of notes for what was supposed to be a short story. Wait…Goodman Brown’s wife did what? And it was an allegory for what? The professor had underlined the word Faith. Seemed like a good starting point, so Mark wrote it down, between his drawing of Baz falling out of the tree house, and his drawing of Bengal getting savaged by a shark.
And realized, without a doubt, that he was going to fail American lit.
* * * *
Mark figured since he’d been late to class, he ought to shoot to arrive early at the Alpha Delt house for pledge introductions.
As he walked up the steps, he could hear shouting.
The door was ajar, but Mark still knocked.
“Dude, you’re fucking wrong!” someone yelled. “Get your shit straight. Paterno had no idea what was going on.”
“You’re telling me he worked every fucking day with Sandusky, and he had no idea?” someone shouted back.
There was a chorus of “ohhhhs.”
“Joe Pa’s not the one who put his dick up those boys’ asses, okay? So why are people trying to drag his name through the mud, and—”
“Because he’s just as bad! He’s covering up for his homo buddy, instead of—”
Mark knocked again, loudly.
There was a scuffling of feet, more muttering and swearing, and then the door swung open to reveal a tall kid who looked like he should have graduated a couple of years ago. It took Mark a second to come up with the name: Chris. Mark had had an interview with him last Thursday. He was lean with broad shoulders, a buzzed head, and a sculpted swath of stubble along his jaw. His blue-gray eyes would have made him sort of pretty if it wasn’t for his mouth, which was perpetually slack, as though he’d opened it to say something, then forgotten what.
Mark thought a little wistfully of Deacon Holt. Now there was the whole package. Well, Mark hadn’t seen the whole package, but he wouldn’t have passed up a chance to. Deacon had a sweet face. Intelligent.
“Hey,” Chris said, stupid mouth hanging open.
“Hey.” Mark nodded, hands in his jeans pockets. He’d caved and put on a polo before coming. Just so Jackson wouldn’t yell at him. “Guess I’m a bit early.”
“Come on in.” Chris opened the door wide, and Mark stepped reluctantly into the house.
It was a big house. It must have been old, properly old. It had polished hardwood floors, architraves, and picture rails. But whatever old-worldy colonial style the house had going on in its bones, the effect was ruined by the pyramid of empty beer cans stacked in the foyer, the collection of bras tacked to the walls, and the blow-up doll jammed headfirst into the banister rails.
Maybe that was a rush-week thing, Mark thought. Not that he was a clean-living prude, but come on? These guys weren’t only dickheads; they were proud of it.
“Well, the football team’s got nothing to do with it,” said the first voice from the common room. “I’m not gonna punish them for what some sick fuck did.”
“We’re having a football argument,” Chris said, leading Mark inside. “You root for Penn?”
“Is it compulsory?” Mark asked. “I prefer not to think about football at all when I’m rooting.”
Chris looked confused.
“Root means fuck,” Mark told him.
“No, it doesn’t.”
“It does.” And Mark was totally, belligerently ready to argue the point like he had on his first day of high school back in Bedford when a girl had said, “Oh, you have to pick a team to root for!” and then looked at him strangely when he’d said, “Is it a team sport here?”
And of course he knew better. He just enjoyed being stubborn about it. Like walking into Deacon’s bar the day of his birthday and asking for a beer, knowing full well he wouldn’t get one. Fuck it. He’d had a point to make. What that point was, Mark wasn’t sure. To feel righteously indignant, maybe. Well, it hadn’t exactly worked out that way. Deacon had been a nice guy, the whole package, and Mark was fairly sure he’d been interested.
Okay, so he hadn’t been able to buy a beer on his eighteenth, but he might have been able to get a root out of it if only Jackson hadn’t interrupted.
Chris tilted his head. “And who the fuck are you again?”
“Jackson’s cousin,” Mark said.
“You should learn to speak American, dude,” Chris said.
“’Murica,” Mark said, giving the guy two thumbs up.
Which must have been the secret password, because Chris grinned and slapped him on the back. Apparently nobody was fluent in sarcasm around here.
Mark had arrived early, but not as early as Brandon, who was standing in the common room trying not to look too nervous, and kind of failing miserably.
“Hey,” he said to Mark, adjusting his collar.
Mark flashed him a smile and, for the first time in months, didn’t wish he was on the other side of the planet. Brandon was nice. A little too earnest and a little too anxious, but he just needed to relax and learn not to give a fuck. And Mark could certainly help him with that.
He practiced not giving a fuck at that very moment, as Jackson wandered up to him.
“At least you dressed properly,” Jackson said, and there wasn’t so much a sneer behind that as a sigh of relief. Like wearing a polo shirt somehow mattered.
“G’day, Jacko,” Mark drawled in his best nobody-actually-speaks-like-that accent. “How ya goin’?”
One of the other frat—sorry, fraternity—brothers roared with laughter, and Mark suddenly understood how he’d been offered a bid. Somehow these guys liked his obnoxiousness. All this time he’d been trying to offend him, they thought he was exotic and interesting with ways strange and different from their own. Like their personal anthropological specimen. Or, most likely, a trained monkey.
Well, bugger.
“What are you doing?” Brandon asked in an undertone as Jackson shook his head and walked away.
“Being friendly,” Mark said.
“You’re being a dick,” Brandon told him. “On purpose.”
Because yeah, in a room full of dicks it was important to make the distinction.
“Sorry,” Mark said, and almost was. “I just…” He gestured at the room. “This whole thing, you know? But I’ll behave, promise.”
Which was what he’d been saying, more or less, ever since he’d arrived in the States. To his mum, to Jim, and now to Brandon.
“Good,” Brandon said in a low voice. “Because I really don’t want to do this on my own.”
The pledging ceremony began ten minutes later. Mark had filled out his recruitment information sheet at the beginning of the week and thought he’d been a pretty good sport about it, listing all his information correctly and handing over the forty-dollar pledge fee with minimal muttering. Forty dollars? Really? He’d also been given a handbook so he could look over the fraternity’s rules and regulations. He had been curious to see what sort of rules existed within a group that used an inflatable sex doll as its unofficial mascot.
The rules were boring as shit, it happened.
Whenever a member, alumnus, or undergraduate of Alpha Delta Fraternity violates the oath taken at initiation…blah, blah, blah. Expulsion, suspension, fines, and reprimands. And a whole lot of crap about who was in charge of this clusterfuck, and the ridiculous titles they gave themselves. Presidents, wardens, heralds—un-fucking-believable. Like it was a serious business.
Which it turned out to be.
Mark was surprised by how quiet everyone got when Chris went up to the podium. The guys who’d been arguing about football had reconciled as soon as the pledges had started to arrive. A couple of the pledges who were whispering and snickering when the ceremony began were quickly reprimanded. An air of solemnity descended, and suddenly the blow-up doll seemed completely out of place.
Chris cleared his throat and began:
“Tonight we welcome the Alpha Delta Phi pledge class for fall semester. Pledges, listen up. We are about to place upon you the pledge pin of our fraternity, which is a token of the high esteem in which you are held by the Prescott Chapter of Alpha Delta Phi.” He held up what was presumably a pledge pin. “Our crest is a hawk sitting on a gorse branch, which is a symbol of the ideals which you will find within Alpha Delta Phi—inner strength, intelligence, and high ideals.”
Mark basically had to tune out there, because this was too much. He’d spent a week watching his fellow rushees staring down the shirts of sorority girls who’d written “rush Alpha Delt” on the tops of their breasts in marker. He’d seen a brother throw up what looked like whole spaghetti all over his own pants. He’d been asked whether he’d go down on a girl who wasn’t shaved.
High ideals? No fucking way. That Chris could even say that with a straight face was impressive.
Beside him, Brandon was leaning forward, rocking slightly like a sycophantic congregation member hanging on the preacher’s every word.
The rest of the speech went along in that vein—they were here to learn, to grow, to serve the community, and to inspire. They were supposed to search within themselves to find the values that formed the basis of brotherhood.
Mark snorted.
He hadn’t meant to do it loudly, but since no one in the room except Chris was making any noise, it carried.
A few of the pledges and brothers turned to look at him. Those who hadn’t heard him snort turned to see what everyone else was looking at. Chris stopped talking and looked right at him.
For several seconds, no one said or did anything. Then Bengal stood. “You,” he said, pointing at Mark. “Cooper. Mark Cooper.”
Mark didn’t respond.
“Do you have a problem with something?” Bengal asked.
Mark opened his mouth to tell them this was all bullshit. That they were a bunch of hypocrites, and he sure as fuck wasn’t going to wear their hawk on a gorse branch. Then he caught Brandon’s stricken expression. Remembered the promise he’d made. Thought about Jim, and how he genuinely wanted things to be okay between them again.
He was glad he couldn’t see Jackson’s face right now. He would be too tempted to forget about Brandon and Jim and be an arsehole.
“No,” he said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “Just had something in my throat.”
Chris was still staring at him. None of the other brothers cracked a smile.
Where were the dudes he’d partied with all week?
“Sorry,” he added.
Chris continued with his speech, and Mark tried his best to listen. When Chris was done, Bengal took the podium.
“All right,” Bengal said. “That was the official speech. Remember it. Carry it in your hearts. Recite it to yourselves each night before you go to bed. It’s important.” He glanced around the room, making sure he had everyone’s attention. “What’s also important is knowing where you stand. So I got a speech to make to you too.”
His gaze fell on Brandon, and Mark half expected Brandon to put his hand to his heart, like Bengal was a rock star who’d just singled him out for a wink or a smile.
“You all think you’re the shit,” Bengal went on. “You got into Prescott. Wow. Congratu-fucking-lations. You must be a genius. Or your parents have money. Mommy and Daddy probably signed you up for an overpriced meal plan. Maybe they gave you a car to celebrate your graduation from teenage day care—sorry, high school. And maybe your friends wrote in your little yearbook that they all knew you’d be successful and wished you luck. And maybe at fucking freshman orientation, some provost told you it was a big accomplishment to get in here, and you ought to be proud of your achievement.” He air quoted “achievement.”
“Basically, at some point, someone has said something that made you feel like you’re the shit. When in fact you’re not the shit. You’re just shit.”
A couple of pledges smiled uneasily.
“You’re laughing?” Bengal demanded. “Don’t laugh. Not unless you want one of my brothers here to piss in that open mouth of yours. You’re not the shit. I’m the shit. Chris here, he’s the shit. Every single man in this room is better than you boys in every way, because we’re older. Because we pledged before you did, and our pledgeship was much harder than your pussy-ass pledgeship is gonna be. Make no mistake, we will ride you until you collapse and have to be shot in the head like a lame racehorse. But know that we had it tougher than you, and we handled it better.”
The noise level in the room swelled considerably, so Mark figured it was safe to snap his fingers, point at the podium, and say, “There it is!” He spoke just loudly enough for Brandon to hear. “I knew something was missing from when we partied with these guys last week. It’s the poorly articulated megalomania and unearned sense of superiority.” He turned to Brandon. “What a relief. I was getting scared they actually cared about high ideals.”
“No, no, shh,” Brandon said, waving his hand like Mark needed to calm the fuck down. “It’s all part of the process. You have to—”
“Shut up!” Bengal shouted to the room. He slapped the podium. “Here are the rules for the next two weeks.” He held up one finger. “You do whatever we tell you to, no questions asked.” He held up two fingers. “No pussy complaints.” Three fingers. “We will not provide you with alcohol. You will not procure alcohol from another source and drink it on the premises. Alcohol has to be earned, like the right to eat and the right to bathe and the right to clean up dog shit with your bare hands when the Phi Sigs let their bitch shit on our lawn. Once you put your pin on, your pledgeship begins. So if you can’t handle this, get your pussy ass out of here now. But first, listen to rule four.”
Bengal waited until his audience was completely silent. “No snitching.” He paused. “You hear that? We’re gonna make you do a lot of shit these next two weeks that you’re not gonna want to do. You tell anyone we made you do it—you tell anyone what I’m telling you right now—we have ways you can’t even imagine of making you sorry. You can decide not to pledge. You can pledge and then run away crying after day one like the little mama’s boy you are. But you don’t tell anyone what goes on here. You got it?”
Mark got it, all right. These guys were a bunch of psychopaths, made even more dangerous by the fact that they didn’t have a brain among them. But all the loneliness and resentment from the last few months welled up in him, and he knew this was perfect. He could take whatever these fuckers gave him and find a way to give it back to them tenfold, because he was smarter. They’d end up kicking him out long before he ran crying from them.
Bring it on, douche bags.
Bengal waited, but no one left the room. “All right,” he said. “If there are no questions, it’s time to recite your pledge.”
* * * *
Secret pledge was secret.
Mark had dutifully held up his hand, solemnly sworn, and now he was an official pledge of Alpha Delta. Yay. He felt in the pocket of his jeans for his cigarettes and decided it was time to go outside for a smoke.
“Hey, pledge!” Blake yelled at him. “We need groceries!”
“Okay,” Mark said and wondered if he was supposed to care.
Then they all started shouting stuff at him, and he realized that not only was he supposed to care, he was supposed to find a grocery store that was still open at this hour, and buy everything they wanted. Which was chips, dips, curly fries, some brand of confectionary he’d never heard of, a cowboy hat, a plush pink kitten, and a blue eraser. There wasn’t a shop in town that would stock all those things, which was probably the point. Mark tuned out somewhere around lube and strawberry-flavored condoms. Because if they thought they’d embarrass him by making him ask for that stuff, they were wrong.
And anyway, he wasn’t going to spend hours on a scavenger hunt for this bunch of pricks.
“And make sure you’re back before midnight!” Chris yelled, laughing.
“Sure,” Mark said.
Both Jackson and Brandon looked at him suspiciously.
Mark detoured to the kitchen on his way out and helped himself to a six-pack. He lit a cigarette as soon as he was outside, and decided to walk to the nearest bar off campus and spend a few hours there instead. And if the nearest bar happened to be Deacon Holt’s, and if Deacon happened to be working?
Sweet.